My family has been wrenched by time and circumstance, and scattered like dust before the wind. But when my father speaks of a big house, da...
My family has been wrenched by time and circumstance, and scattered like dust before the wind. But when my father speaks of a big house, days spent with grandparents and cousins, I know he is reminiscing about his childhood in Barisal in Bangladesh. I can almost see him journeying to school by boat, bending over to watch the sudden appearance of a gharial in the murky waters. I can picture movements turning into migrations that fracture large families into smaller nuclear structures. And I piece together this past from sepia-tinted photos in old albums or from stories shared at family gatherings, in real world or on the internet.
There is a man in a few photographs who appears to be an authority figure. There are adults flanking him and children sitting at his feet. To me, my siblings and cousins, he was Great Uncle, kind of like a dadu. In the photos, he isn’t smiling. His eyes look straight ahead, in a kind of distracted astuteness, and faint frown lines are visible on his forehead.
Great Uncle was my grandmother’s brother and an advocate in Barisal, a city now in south Bangladesh. He had an intimate knowledge of Barisal and a few villages down...
